Last February, when NBC announced that they would be returning to the world of Tim Kring’s superhero drama “Heroes” with the planned mini-series “Heroes Reborn,” there were a lot of questions about the direction of the new show. Over a year later and they’re now just days away from starting production on the pilot with the most recent announcement being that Masi Oka would return as his popular Emmy-nominated character Hiro Nakamura, joining the previously-announced Jack Coleman as well as newcomers Zachary Levi, Ryan Guzman, Robbie Kay, Danika Yarosh, Judith Shekoni, Kiki Sukezane, Henry Zebrowski and Gatlin Green.

Before that announcement, SuperHeroHype had a chance to speak with Matt Shakman, best known for directing FX’s “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” and “Fargo,” who had scored the plum assignment of directing at least the pilot for “Heroes Reborn.” We asked him a couple of burning questions about the new show.

The first thing we wanted to know was whether or not people would have to have seen the original “Heroes” to come on board with the new mini-series.

“You could absolutely come to this show completely new, without having watched any of the previous show,” Shakman confirmed. “You can also have been an ardent fan of the previous show and come and find things in there that you will respond to. There will be Easter eggs and just little sort of tidbits and nods to the old show, much like the ‘Fargo’ miniseries. You don’t have to be a student of the Coen Brothers to appreciate that miniseries, but if you are a big fan, you’ll notice a million Easter eggs and homage to other Coen Brothers movies, not just ‘Fargo.’so we’re definitely trying to do that. We’re trying to create an entry point here for ‘Heroes Reborn,’ where anyone can start watching now, but it will also be something that the fans from before will really respond to.”

“I think that Tim even felt that the first season and the first couple of seasons (were good)… and then they hit the writer’s strike and they were churning out more episodes than they wanted to, but what the network wanted,” Shakman said about the earlier series’ demise as it lost viewers. “It was tough to keep that complicated mythology going in some of the episodes. So here we are, we’re doing a 13-episode season. It’s all intricately-planned out and it’s going to be really something.”

“We’ve done a little bit of shooting already and then we’re still in prep,” he said about the production plans. “We did some complicated pre-shooting stuff, and then we really, really start in on this on April 6th. It’s going to be really fun. It’s big. It’s going to be really ambitious.”

Look for the rest of our interview with Shakman over on ComingSoon.net later this week.